The Eternal Adam and other stories (2 page)

Reminiscences of childhood and youth? You
are well advised in asking them of men of my years. The things seen or done by
us in childhood are more deeply impressed upon our memory than are those of
maturer age.

When one has passed beyond the number of
years usually allotted to man, the mind takes pleasure in reverting to early
days. The images it evokes are of those that never fade. Like indelible
photographs, time only serves to bring them out into clearer relief.

Thus is justified that deep saying of a
French writer, ‘Memory is far-sighted.’ It lengthens as it grows older, like a
telescope when the barrel is drawn out, and discovers the most distant features
of the past.

But are such reminiscences likely to be
interesting? I cannot say. At any rate, perhaps the young readers of
The
Youth’s Companion
may be curious to learn how the calling of a writer,
which I still follow, although more than sixty years of age, first suggested
itself to me.

So, at the request of the editor of that paper, I extend the telescope
of my memory, turn round and look back.

In the first place, have I always had a
taste for stories wherein the imagination gives itself free scope? Yes,
doubtless, and my family have always held arts and letters in honour; whence I
conclude that inheritance accounts in a large measure for my instincts.

Then again, there is this further reason
that I was born at Nantes, where I spent nearly the whole of my childhood. The
son of a father who was half a Parisian, and of a mother who was quite a
Bretonne, I lived in the maritime bustle of a big commercial city which is the
starting-point and goal of many long voyages.

I still see the river Loire, whose numerous
arms are connected by a league of bridges, its quays encumbered by freight in
the shadow of huge elms, along which did not then run the double railway track
and the tramway lines.

Ships two or three rows deep line the
wharves. Others sail up or down the stream. No steamboats were to be seen in
those days, or, at least, very few of them. But there were many of those
sailing-vessels, the type of which Americans were shrewd enough to retain and
improve into clippers and three-masted schooners.

In those days the only kind of
sailing-vessels we had were the lubberly merchantmen. What memories they
recall! In fancy I climbed their shrouds, triced their maintops, and clung to
their skyrakers. How I longed to cross the swaying plank that connected them
with the quay, and set foot on their deck!

But, childishly timid as I was, I did not
dare. Timid? Aye, I was indeed; and yet I had already seen one revolution, the
overthrow of a regime and a new royalty founded, although I was only two years
old; and I still hear the rattle of the musketry of 1830 in the streets of the
town where, as in Paris, the people fought against the royal troops.

One day, however, I did venture to scale
the netting of a three-master, while its watchman caroused in a neighbouring
wine shop.

I was soon on deck. My hand caught hold of
a halyard that slid in its block. What joy was in me! The hatches were open,
and I leaned over their sides. The strong odours that came from the hold went
to my head: odours in which the pungent smell of tar mixes with the perfume of
spices.

I rose, went back towards the poop and
entered. The interior was filled with those marine scents which give to it an
atmosphere like that of the ocean.

Yonder appear the cabins with their
creaking partitions, where I should have wished to live for months, and those
bunks, so hard and narrow, wherein I should have liked to sleep whole nights.
Then there was the room occupied by the captain, a much more important
personage in my opinion than any king’s minister or lieutenant-general of the
kingdom.

I came out, mounted the poop, and there
actually made so bold as to turn the wheel a quarter round! I fancied the
vessel was about to leave its moorings; that its hawsers had been cast off.That
its masts were crowded with sail, and that I, an eight-year-old helmsman, was
about to steer it out to sea!

The sea! Well, neither my brother, who
became a sailor a few years later, nor I had yet seen it.

In summer all our family kept within the
bounds of a large country place not far from the banks of the Loire, in the
midst of vineyards, meadows and marshes.

It was the residence of an old uncle,
formerly a ship-owner. He had been to Caracas and to Porto Bello. We used to
call him ‘Uncle Prudent’, and it was in remembrance of him that I gave the name
to one of my personages in
Robur the Conqueror.
But Caracas was in
America – a country which fascinated me already.

Not being able to sail the sea, my brother and I drifted about the open
fields and threaded the woods together. Not having any masts to climb, we spent
whole days at the tops of the trees. He was the greater fellow who made his
nest the higher in them. We chatted, read, or projected voyages, while the
branches swayed by the breeze, gave us the illusion of the pitching and rolling
on board ship. Ah, those delicious leisure hours!

At that time people travelled little or not
at all. Oil street-lamps, breeches, the National Guard and the flint and
tinder-box were then quite the fashion. Yes, I have witnessed the genesis of
phosphoric matches, detached collars, cuffs, letter paper, postage stamps,
pantaloons, the overcoat, the opera hat. women’s boots, the metric system, the
steamboats of the Loire, which are said to be ‘inexplosive’ because they blow
up a little less often than the rest, the buses, railways, tramways, gas,
electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, and the phonograph.

I belong to that generation which is
comprised between those two geniuses, Stephenson and Edison. And I now witness
those astonishing discoveries, at the head of which marches America, with its
movable hotels, its sandwich-making machines, its movable pavement, its
newspapers printed with chocolate ink, upon stiff, thin sheets of pastry, which
are read first and eaten afterward!

I was not ten years old when my father
bought a small place at the extremity of the town, at Chantenay -a pretty name
that! It was situated on a hill which overlooks the right bank of the Loire.
From my little room I could see the river winding over an extent of two or
three leagues, between the meadows which it flooded when the waters overflowed
in winter time. In summer, it is true, the water would be low, and from the
river bed there rose strips of lovely yellow sand, an archipelago of constantly
changing islets.

Ah, the Loire! If it cannot be compared
with the Hudson, the Mississippi, or the St Lawrence, it is none the less one
of the finest rivers of France. It would no doubt be looked upon as a small
stream in America; but then, America is not simply a ‘country’, – it is a whole
continent.

Nevertheless, at sight of so many passing ships, I felt an eager
leaning toward the sea. I was well versed in the seaman’s language, and understood
naval manoeuvres sufficiently to follow them out in the maritime novels of
Fenimore Cooper, whom I never tired of reading, and still read with admiration.
Looking through a little telescope, I saw the ships, ready to tack about, hoist
their jibs and gather in their sails, shifting first abaft, then at the bows.
But my brother and I had still not sampled sailing on a stream ... that came
later.

At the farther end of the port there was a
man who kept boats to let, at twenty cents for the day. This was a heavy sum
for our purses. It was also imprudent to embark in the man’s boats, for they
leaked sadly.

The first one we took had but a single
mast, but the second had two, and the third had three, like the coasting
luggers and fishing-smacks. We went out with the ebb-tide, luffing against the
west wind.

What a schooling was ours! The blunders we
made in steering and in working the sails, the sheets let out at the wrong
moment, and the shame of tacking with a back wind, when the waves ran high in
the broad basin of the Loire, in front of our Chantenay!

Generally we went out with the ebb and came
back with the flow, a few hours later. And, as our clumsy hired craft sailed
heavily along between the banks, what a look of envy we cast on the pretty
pleasure yachts that went lightly scudding over the bosom of the river!

One day I happened to be alone in a sorry
yawl, which had no keel. I was some two leagues beyond Chantenay, when one of
the planks was stove in, and the water came into the boat. There was no stopping
the hole. The yawl went down head-foremost, and I had just time to save myself
by swimming to an islet all covered with a thick growth of reeds, the tufted
tops of which were swayed by the wind.

Now, of all the books I had read in my
childhood, the one I liked best was
The Swiss Family Robinson;
I
preferred it to
Robinson Crusoe.
I know that Daniel Defoe’s work is
broader in its philosophical scope. It is man given up to himself alone, who
one day discovers a footprint on the sand. But the work of Wyss, in rich facts
and incidents, is perhaps more interesting to a youthful mind. It had the
family, the father, the mother, the children in all their diverse aptitudes.
How many years I passed on that island! With what enthusiasm I followed their
discoveries! How I envied their lot! So it doesn’t surprise me that I was to be
irresistibly drawn to create
The Mysterious Island,
‘the Robinsons of
science’, and in
Two Years Holiday
a whole boarding school of Robinson
Crusoes!

Meanwhile, I was enacting, on my little
island, not the part of Wyss’s hero, but that of Defoe’s. I was already
meditating the construction of a log-hut, the manufacture of a fishing-line
with a reed, and of fish-hooks with thorns, and of obtaining fire as the
savages do, by rubbing one dry stick against another.

Signals? I should decline to make any, for
they would be answered too soon, and I should be saved quicker than I wished to
be.

The first thing was to appease my hunger.
But how? My provisions had gone down with the wreck. Go hunting birds? I had
neither dog nor gun. Well, what about shellfish? There were none.

Now, at last. I was made acquainted with
all the agony of being shipwrecked on a desert island, and with horrors of
privation such as the Selkirks and other personages mentioned in the
‘Celebrated Shipwrecks’ had experienced – men who were not imaginary Robinsons!
My stomach cried with hunger.

The thing lasted only a few hours, for, as
soon as it was low tide, I had merely to wade ankle-deep through the water to
reach what I called the mainland, namely, the right bank of the Loire.

I quietly came back home, where I had to
put up with the family dinner instead of the Crusoe repast I had dreamed of – raw
shellfish, a slice of peccary, and bread made from the flour of manioc!

Such was this lively bit of navigation,
with its head-winds, its foundering and disabled vessel – everything in fact
that a shipwrecked mariner of my age could desire.

I have sometimes heard the reproach that my books excite young boys to
quit their homes for adventurous travel. This, I am sure, has never been the
case. But if boys should be brought to launch out into such enterprises, let
them take example from the heroes of my
Extraordinary Voyages,
and they
are sure to come safe into harbour again.

At twelve years of age I had not yet set
eyes on the sea. Except in thought, I had not hitherto set foot on the many
sardine-boats, fishing-smacks, brigs, schooners, three-masters, or even
steamboats – they were then styled
pyroscaphes
– which sailed towards
the mouth of the Loire.

One day, however, my brother and I got
permission to take passage on board Pyroscaphe No. Two. What joy was ours! It
was enough to make us lose our wits.

Soon we were on our way. We passed Indret,
the huge State establishment, all feathered in dark wreaths of smoke. We left
behind the landing-places on either bank. – Coueron, Le Pellerin, Paimboeuf.
Our pyroscaphe crossed obliquely the broad estuary of the river.

We reached St Nazaire, with its incipient
pier, its old church and slate-covered, slanting steeple, and the few houses or
ramshackle tenements, which at that time made up the village that has so
rapidly increased into a large town.

To rush off the boat and dash down the
seaweed-coated rocks, in order to take up some of the sea-water in the hollow
of our hands and convey it to our lips, was for my brother and myself our first
impulse.

‘But it isn’t salty!’ said I, turning pale.

‘Not a bit!’ responded my brother.

‘We have been hoaxed!’ I exclaimed, in a
tone which betrayed the liveliest disappointment.

Noodles that we were! It was low tide, and
we had simply scooped up from the hollow of a rock some of the water of the
Loire.

As the tide came in, however, we found it briny beyond our best hopes.